THAME, England — (BUSINESS WIRE) — June 22, 2009 —
The Open Virtual Platform (OVP) initiative (
www.OVPworld.org),
founded by Imperas with the help of 18 companies and individuals from
the embedded systems user community, processor intellectual property
developers, electronic design automation, service providers and
academia, has celebrated its one year anniversary. OVP technology
provides solutions to the problems embedded software developers incur
when modeling the multi-processor system on chip (MPSoC) that hosts
their software.
Imperas
reported that more than 1,200 individuals have registered on the OVP
website (
www.OVPworld.org)
with more than 8,000 downloads of models and tools.

As demand for Multi-Core platforms and MPSoCs increases, the need for a
suitable, cost effective virtualized software development environment
has become critical. “We recognized the weaknesses inherent in the
current development environments for software running on multi-core
parallel platforms. The phenomenal success and support of the OVP
initiative confirms OVP is addressing this need,” stated Simon
Davidmann, president and CEO, Imperas and founding director of the OVP
initiative. “We launched OVP a year ago to provide that infrastructure –
free open source models and infrastructure focused on multi-core and
speed – for simulating the platforms used for embedded software
development. Our open virtual platforms provide a vehicle for embedded
software developers, and deliver complete transparency and control over
the software being developed. Simulation technology is the key.”

Imperas reports that the success of OVP is prompting processor vendors,
OS providers, embedded systems companies and others to increase adoption
of simulation technology and virtual platforms as key components in
their development environments. Nine companies and institutions have
already added their support to the original founding companies, bringing
the OVP membership to 27 companies. These include: Cadence,
CriticalBlue, Denali, EVE, Forte, MIPS, SpringSoft, Tensilica, Doulos,
Posedge Software, VinChip.

“The ease with which users can utilize OVP to build a virtual platform,
then integrate OVPsim with Cadence’s Incisive Software eXtensions
product, enables much more rigorous and robust verification of
hardware/software interactions,” said Ran Avinum, Group Marketing
Director at Cadence. Avinum continued, “System and software developers
can now take the same industry leading verification technology and
methodology being used on the design of their SoC for verification of
the virtual platform before sharing it with application developers, or
of the complete application software system.”

“Developing software for complex SoCs demands the use of extremely fast
virtual platforms. The success of Open Virtual Platforms is addressing
these unique requirements,” commented Davidmann. “The availability of
fast, vendor certified processor models and the growing library of open
source components and platforms demonstrates that the embedded system
community recognizes that OVP can help make software developers more
productive, ensure higher quality software and dramatically reduce
development costs for MPSoCs.”

Chezi Ganesan, President & CEO of VinChip Systems Inc., said: "VinChip,
an established developer of hardware IP cores, believes that there is
significant opportunity in developing models at a higher level of
abstraction. Open Virtual Platforms enables IP providers like VinChip to
add more value to our product line."

Year One Milestones:

The primary OVP objective is to enable the industry to build a suitable
and effective multi-core virtual platform software development
infrastructure. Year one OVP milestones include:

the development of 16 processor models

the addition of a native interface to the SystemC/Transaction Level
Modeling (TLM)-2.0 interface

the availability of platforms that boot operating systems, including
multi-core SMP Linux running faster than real time

the verification of processor models by 2 major vendors including the
MIPS32 4K, 24K and 34K families being MIPS-Verified™ by MIPS
Technologies and the ARC® 605 being verified by ARC International

research projects utilizing OVP by the Indian Institute of Technology
Delhi and the University of Southampton

the donation of open source peripheral and behavioral models to the
OVP community, available for free download from the website

the integration of other tools to the Open Virtual Platforms simulator
(OVPsim) for enhanced software functional and performance
verification, including Cadence’s Incisive Software eXtensions (ISX)

In related news, the success of OVPsim on Windows and requests from the
OVP user base for Linux hosted machines has led to its release for
non-commercial usage.

Open Virtual Platforms

OVP includes the OVPsim simulator, libraries of models and APIs for
developing new models. OVPsim executes platforms, including multicore
platforms, at hundreds of millions of instructions per second, providing
the speed that software developers require for simulation of embedded
systems. Model libraries include everything from individual processor
and component models to more complex platforms, such as MIPS Malta
development board for running Linux. APIs enable the community to
develop models of processors, behavioral components and peripherals, and
to connect these together into virtual platforms that run the final
target system software binaries unchanged.